Introduction

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (“Laos”) has a population of 6.3 million people, of which the majority are poor rural farmers: 79.4% of the population live in rural areas and 74.1% of the country’s population live on less than 2 USD/day. Indicators of health in Laos are relatively low, with life expectancy of 63 years, and a high infant mortality rate of 62/1000 live births.

The Wellcome Trust-Mahosot Hospital-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Collaboration aims, through research and increased locally applicable knowledge, to contribute to improving the health of Lao people.

The Collaboration is a small clinical research unit based in the Microbiology Laboratory of Mahosot Hospital, in the capital city of Vientiane. It was founded in 2000 and is responsible to the Curative Department, Ministry of Health, Lao PDR, and linked to the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, and the University of Oxford.

The Collaboration was founded to investigate the clinical epidemiology of infectious diseases and thiamine deficiency, with the objective of determining how inexpensive collaborative clinical research can help guide the health policies of a small tropical country. We work to answer key questions important for public health, such as determining the causes of non-malarial fever, how these diseases can be diagnosed accurately and inexpensively and what are the locally appropriate optimum treatments. This information is useful in individual patient care and in facilitating evidence-based health policy change

Mahosot Hospital is a 365 bed, primary-tertiary hospital of the Ministry of Health, specialising in internal medicine. Mahosot Hospital’s Microbiology Laboratory, originally built in the 1920s, was renovated in 2002 through the generosity of Mr Peter Sykes. The laboratory is the routine microbiology laboratory for the hospital and has facilities for examination and culture of blood, stool, urine and cerebrospinal fluid and rickettsial, leptospiral and viral serology, rickettisial and cerebrospinal fluid bacterial and viral pathogen PCR and rickettsial culture. The laboratory participates in the NEQAS (UK) quality assurance scheme.

The work of the Collaboration is largely funded by the Wellcome Trust. We have also received grants for specific projects from the British Embassy, Bangkok, and the World Health Organisation .